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carbon dioxide
Arctic Tundra Has Turned From 'Carbon Sink to Carbon Source' in Dangerous Flip: NOAA
"This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution," said one scientist.
Dec 10, 2024
Permafrost in the Arctic has stored carbon dioxide for millennia, but the annual Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a concerning shift linked to planetary heating and a rising number of wildfires in the icy region: The tundra is now emitting more carbon than it is storing.
The report card revealed that over the last year, the tundra's temperature rose to its second-highest level on record, causing the frozen soil to melt.
The melting of the permafrost activates microbes in the soil which decompose the trapped carbon, causing it to be released into the atmosphere as planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.
The release of fossil fuels from the permafrost is also being caused by increased Arctic wildfires, which have emitted an average of 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.
"Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts," said Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA. "This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution."
Sue Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts and one of 97 international scientists who contributed to the Arctic Report Card, told NPR that 1.5 trillion tons of carbon are still being stored in the tundra—suggesting that the continued warming of the permafrost could make it a huge source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Along with the "Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source," NOAA reported declines in caribou herds and increasing winter precipitation.
The report card showed that the autumn of 2023 and summer of 2024 saw the second- and third-warmest temperatures on record across the Arctic, and a heatwave in August 2024 set an all-time record for daily temperatures in several communities in northern Alaska and Canada.
The last nine years have been the nine warmest on record in the Arctic region.
"Many of the Arctic's vital signs that we track are either setting or flirting with record-high or record-low values nearly every year," said Gerald (J.J.) Frost, a senior scientist with Alaska Biological Research, Inc. and a veteran Arctic Report Card author. "This is an indication that recent extreme years are the result of long-term, persistent changes, and not the result of variability in the climate system."
Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, emphasized that the continuous release of fossil fuel emissions from oil and gas extraction and other pollution has caused the Arctic to warm at a faster rate than the Earth as a whole over the past 11 years.
"These combined changes are contributing to worsening wildfires and thawing permafrost to an extent so historic that it caused the Arctic to be a net carbon source after millennia serving as a net carbon storage region," said Ekwurzel. "If this becomes a consistent trend, it will further increase climate change globally."
The Arctic Report Card was released weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump has pledged to slash climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration and to increase oil and gas production. He has mused that sea-level rise will create "more oceanfront property" and has called the climate crisis a "hoax," while his nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright, the CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, has claimed that climate warming is good for the planet.
"These sobering impacts in the Arctic are one more manifestation of how policymakers in the United States and around the world are continuing to prioritize the profits of fossil fuel polluters over the well-being of people and the planet and putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement in peril," said Ekwurzel. "All countries, but especially wealthy, high-emitting nations, need to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions at a rapid pace in accord with the latest science and aid in efforts of climate-vulnerable communities to prepare for what's to come and help lower-resourced countries working to decrease emissions too."
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'Words Fail': WMO Report Finds CO2 Accumulating at Record Levels
"The report is very clear: This crisis is driven by the profit-driven production of coal, oil, and gas," one climate advocacy group said.
Oct 29, 2024
Climate-heating carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere more rapidly than at any time since humans evolved.
That's just one of the alarming findings from the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released Monday, which found that all three main greenhouse gases reached record atmospheric levels in 2023.
"Words fail," the group Climate Defiance wrote on social media in response to the news.
"Greenhouse gas pollution at these levels will guarantee a human and economic trainwreck for every country, without exception."
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 hit 420.0 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, an increase of 151% since the Industrial Revolution and a level not seen since 3 to 5 million years ago, when global temperatures was 2-3°C hotter than today and sea levels were 10-20 meters higher. Methane hit 1,934 parts per billion (ppb)—or 265% higher than preindustrial levels—and nitrous oxide rose to 336.9 ppb, 125% of pre-1750 levels.
"Another year. Another record," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. "This should set alarm bells ringing among decision-makers. We are clearly off track to meet the Paris agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C and aiming for 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. These are more than just statistics. Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet."
Carbon dioxide rose by 2.3 ppm in 2023. While that was higher than the 2022 increase, it was lower than in 2019-2021. However, on a longer-term scale, atmospheric CO2 rose by 11.4% in the past 10 years, a record increase during human existence. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of this increase.
"The report is very clear: This crisis is driven by the profit-driven production of coal, oil, and gas," Climate Defiance wrote. "Because of these fuels, planet-heating pollution levels have gone up by 51.5%—since 1990 alone."
However, 2023's CO2 increases were also caused by forest fires—including a record-breaking fire season in Canada—as well as a possible reduction in the ability of Earth's natural carbon sinks to absorb the greenhouse gas. While vegetation-related CO2 emissions are partially influenced by natural cycles—El Niño years like 2023 are drier and tend to see more fires—they could also be a sign of dangerous feedback loops.
"The Bulletin warns that we face a potential vicious cycle," said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett. "Natural climate variability plays a big role in carbon cycle. But in the near future, climate change itself could cause ecosystems to become larger sources of greenhouse gases."
"Wildfires could release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, whilst the warmer ocean might absorb less CO2. Consequently, more CO2 could stay in the atmosphere to accelerate global warming," Barrett explained. "These climate feedbacks are critical concerns to human society."
The report also said that even if emissions were to cease rapidly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that the current rise in temperatures would linger for decades.
The rise in methane is also a concern. While it increased less in 2023 than in 2022, it hit a record-high increase over the last five years, and some of this could be due to climate feedback loops such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost or greater emissions from wetlands and other natural ecosystems as temperatures rise.
As Climate Defiance noted, WMO's graph showing the rise of methane appears to move from a linear to an exponential progression as it approaches 2023.
"It could literally be the graph that defines human history," Climate Defiance wrote.
"The most infuriating part is it didn't have to be this way," the group continued. "Had we started taking action in the 1970s—when the threat became clear—we could have easily stopped the crisis by now. Instead we gorged ourselves on SUVs and McMansions as politicians dithered and delayed."
The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin is one of several annual reports released ahead of United Nations climate conferences; this year, world leaders are scheduled to gather in Baku, Azerbaijan starting on November 11 for COP29. The Bulletin comes alongside other reports finding that national policies are not on track to reduce emissions in line with the Paris agreement temperature goals.
Last week, the U.N. Emissions Gap Report concluded that current policies put the world on course for as much as 3.1°C of warming. Also on Monday, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) released its 2024 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Synthesis Report, in which it assesses the commitments that different nations have made to reduce emissions under the Paris agreement.
It found that current NDCs would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6% of 2019 levels by 2030, a far cry from the 43% needed to have a chance at limiting global heating to 1.5°C by 2100 and preventing ever-worsening climate impacts.
"Greenhouse gas pollution at these levels will guarantee a human and economic trainwreck for every country, without exception," U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said in a statement of the current 2030 trajectory.
"Today's NDC Synthesis Report must be a turning point, ending the era of inadequacy and sparking a new age of acceleration, with much bolder new national climate plans from every country due next year," Stiell said. "The report's findings are stark but not surprising—current national climate plans fall miles short of what's needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy, and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country."
"By contrast," Stiell continued, "much bolder new national climate plans can not only avert climate chaos—done well, they can be transformational for people and prosperity in every nation."
Climate Defiance also called for renewed ambition.
"It is not too late," the group said. "There is still a small window of opportunity. Together, we will unite to stop our own demise. We will rise. We will defy all odds. There is no alternative."
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Look Up: The Scariest Part When We See the Big, Big, Big Picture
As a new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
Oct 23, 2024
This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.
This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.
But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.
The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.
In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic
Without rapid action to curbgreenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.
But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.
Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.
Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.
That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.
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